a power to hold her from the way her passion led. And back of
all was the ancient hatred, the heritage from ages lost in the
beginnings of the race, man's of man in the struggle for a woman.

David rose from his crouching posture to his knees. The other, all his
savage instincts primed for onslaught, saw menace in the movement, and
stood braced and ready. Like Susan he understood that David had
guessed the secret. He could judge him only by his own measure, and he
knew the settling of the score had come. There was no right or justice
in his claim, only the right of the stronger to win what he wanted, but
that to him was the supreme right.

David's sick fury shot up into living flame. He judged Susan innocent,
a tool in ruthless hands. He saw the destroyer of their lives, a devil
who had worked subtly for his despoilment. The air grew dark and in
the center of the darkness, his hate concentrated on the watching face,
and an impulse, the strongest of his life, nerved him with the force to
kill. For once he broke beyond himself, rose outside the restrictions
that had held him cowering within his sensitive shell. His rage had
the vehemence of a distracted woman's, and he threw himself upon his
enemy, inadequate now as always, but at last unaware and unconscious.

They clutched and rocked together. From the moment of the grapple it
was unequal--a sick and wounded creature struggling in arms that were
as iron bands about his puny frame. But as a furious child fights for
a moment successfully with its enraged elder, he tore and beat at his
opponent, striking blindly at the face he loathed, writhing in the grip
that bent his body and sent the air in sobbing gasps from his lungs.
Their trampling was muffled on the stone, their shadows leaped in
contorted waverings out from their feet and back again. Broken and
twisted in Courant's arms, David felt no pain only the blind hate, saw
the livid plain heaving about him, the white ball of the sun, and
twisting through the reeling distance the pale thread of the Emigrant
Trail, glancing across his ensanguined vision like a shuttle weaving
through a blood-red loom.

They staggered to the edge of the plateau and there hung. It was only
for a moment, a last moment of strained and swaying balance. Courant
felt the body against his weaken, wrenched himself free, and with a
driving blow sent it outward over the precipice. It fell with the arms
flung wide, the head dropped